Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This volume brings together the poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counter-culture. They include the apocalyptic ‘Howl’, which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, ‘Kaddish’; the searing indictment of his homeland, ‘America’; and the confessional ‘Mescaline’. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

‘He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt’ William Carlos Williams